This past year has seen massive gains for many cryptocurrencies. We know of the big names, Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and IOTA. One cryptocurrency which has also had a huge rise this past year that many do not consider is Dogecoin. At the time of writing, one Dogecoin is worth one penny (and is also worth one Dogecoin).

Dogecoin hits a penny

Considering that earlier this year, a penny could buy you between 3-5 doge, this is huge. It has been an early Christmas gift to the Dogecoin

community, and it has catapulted the currency back into the top 35 cryptos on CoinMarketCap. Previously, Dogecoin was hovering somewhere around #40-50 in the rankings.

The old joke coin still has some bite to it, and the coin’s tenacity is upheld and strengthened by its great community. Even at its current price, Dogecoin is still cheap and forgiving enough as an entry point to cryptocurrencies, I believe. Perhaps that, along with some other market conditions (both known and unknown) are responsible for the price going up, since there are many new people coming into crypto and Dogecoin is an excellent model/example of how many blockchains work.

The downside to the penny

While this development is very positive and will help give more exposure to the community, Dogecoin’s set fee of one doge per transaction is getting costlier and costlier. Transaction fees rise and fall parallel to the price of Dogecoin. While the fee is still only a penny, this is about four times as much as it was earlier this year. I’m not really complaining, but it is something to keep in mind.

Ultimately, price shouldn’t matter

One of the reasons I think Dogecoin has performed as well and lived as long as it has is because the price doesn’t really matter for many in the community. Go to its subreddit and just see how many comments on hype posts are “1 doge = 1 doge.” And this is a very good point. Community

is what gives value to money. Money without communities isn’t worth anything.

It would be interesting if other crypto communities viewed their coins in the same way, as a standalone – something that was a non-correlated asset. Instead of bemoaning paying 10,000 BTC for two pizzas because of what that would be worth in USD now, people would just say, “Yeah, those pizzas cost 10k BTC.” It would bring crypto closer to being a community of users, rather than a community of speculators. At least, that’s my two doge.